"When the Spirit of Truth comes,
he will guide you into all truth;
for he will not speak on his own authority,
but whatever he hears he will speak,
and he will declare to you the things that are to come."
(John 16:13)

Monday, July 30, 2012

Now, beyond all optimism I was capable of mustering, Mr. Obama won Iowa! … Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace on the surface. This is the old revolutionary 'mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through… (Emphasis added)·- Communist Frank Chapman, who described Obama’s 2008 Iowa caucus victory in the communist newspaper People’s World in 2008

Friday, July 20, 2012

A couple of disturbing videos were uploaded to YouTube today from Syria showing disoriented victims being treated for difficulty breathing and tearing. This seems suggestive of the use of some sort of chemical agents by the Assad regime.

Notably, the way that a woman and child are featured in the video is such that one might wonder if what we're seeing is contrived to precipitate the story of Assad starting to use chemical weapons against his own people. This, in turn, is setting the stage for Western, and possibly Israeli, military intervention.

As noted in the following report from CNN, use of chemical weapons by Assad may constitute a "red line" for the international community:

Israel “will have to strike” at Syrian weapons shipments if they are being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon amid the collapse of the Assad regime, a prominent Israeli military analyst said on national television Friday night.

Roni Daniel, of Israel’s most-watched news station Channel 2, made the prediction immediately after Defense Minister Ehud Barak had indicated warily in two TV interviews that Israel was preparing options to ensure Syrian weapons did not reach the pro-Iranian Hezbollah.

The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story is a feature-length documentary film.

The great political upheaval of the late 20th century--the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union--is now generally regarded as the spontaneous product of long-accumulating social and economic pressures. The political confusion and economic disarray that followed is seen as nothing more than a passing phase in an inevitable march toward a more perfect democracy.

During the final phase of the Cold War the Soviet Union, under its dogmatic and visibly senile party bosses, was sinking into near-bankruptcy. Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the KGB, the only organization with both a full knowledge of the state of the economy and a mastery of strategic decisions, came to the conclusion that there was no cure for the grave illness of the communist system. To preserve the wealth that threatened to slip out of the leaders' hands, he masterminded a nearly unthinkable program, throwing into the fire Moscow's rule over the Eastern European bloc, and, as it turned out, the ruling party of the USSR itself. Though Andropov died in 1984, the signs of his hand in the events that followed remain visible, as well as the role of his handpicked successor Mikhail Gorbachev. Our witnesses testify that what appeared to be a spontaneous freedom movement in 1989 was in fact a coup d'etat orchestrated from Moscow in offices of the Russian KGB.

Perhaps for the first time in known history, we have walked through a revolution without realizing who are the real winners and losers.

The consequences are far reaching and people in the West seem to have a short memory. It's clear today that development in Russia didn't go the way the West anticipated. Russia became the perfect KGB state. 80% of government officials are former or active KGB officers, including President Vladimir Putin himself. The objective of the Soviet regime was to overthrow the United States as the world's leading power. The Soviet KGB fathered state-sponsored terrorism. The PLO was dreamt up by KGB. In 1960s a new element was added to the Soviet/PLO war; international terrorism. Today's international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka.

As Yuri Andropov once explained to Ion Pacepa, the Muslim world was a Petri dish in which the Russians might "nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought." KGB General Alexander Sakharovsky once said to Pacepa: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." Americans and Europeans no longer remember the past and don't realize that history is now repeating itself. No effective counter-strategy is likely to emerge from Washington because a regime predicated on economic optimism cannot accept the negative implications of ongoing Russian enmity. People will simply believe what they wish to believe. More people indulge their own ideas of the world rather than deal with its realities.

I received my copy today in the mail and am watching it as I type this.

If you believe in political correctness, then this film is not for you!

In astounding interviews with Soviet defectors and top experts from the U.S. intelligence community, e.g., Vladimir Bukovsky, Robert Gates, Edward Jay Epstein, Jeff Nyquist, etc., a compelling case is made that recent history concerning Russia is not what it seems. The reality is that Moscow has been engaging in systematic historical deception that kicked off in earnest two decades ago with the feigned collapse of the Soviet Union. Make no mistake about it....this is a historical lie and the free world is now vulnerable to what may be the greatest upset imaginable, i.e., the destruction and subjugation of Western Civilization by the "Old Enemy".

Something fundamental shifted in Damascus on Wednesday, a kind of before-the-bombing reality and a far different one afterward.
“Really, up until this morning you could sense that the regime still had a firm grip over the country,” said a 25-year-old resident of the old city, declining to give her name amid the unsettling events.
Stores were initially open, she said, and the traffic, albeit light, moved easily. University students were sitting for exams.
Then came the startling announcements on state television, one after another starting around noon, that a bomb had exploded in a small meeting of the country’s crucial security figures, killing three of them, including Asef Shawkat, the brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad.
“Everything changed after 3 p.m., and things turned in a totally different direction,” she said, echoing comments made by numerous Damascus residents reached via the Internet.

The killing on Wednesday of President Bashar al-Assad’s key security aides in a brazen bombing attack, close to Mr. Assad’s own residence, called into question the ability of a government that depends on an insular group of loyalists to function effectively as it battles a strengthening opposition.
The strike dealt a potent blow to the government, as much for where it took place as for the individuals who were targeted: the very cabinet ministers and intelligence chiefs who have coordinated the government’s iron-fisted approach to the uprising. The defense minister and the president’s brother-in-law were both killed, and others were seriously wounded.
The attack on the leadership’s inner sanctum as fighting raged in sections of the city for the fourth day suggested that the uprising had reached a decisive moment in the overall struggle for Syria. The battle for the capital, the center of Assad family power, appears to have begun. Though there was no indication he was wounded, Mr. Assad stayed out of public view — unusual but not unprecedented in a secretive country where the government has long tried to present an image of quiet control.

There's only one problem with mainstream news reports above about the Damascus bombing and likewise the response of the U.S. government to this news: it appears that no such bombing at the Syrian National Security Headquarters actually took place.

BBC News started to ascertain that something was seriously amiss right after Syrian national TV reported the bombing:

The reported attack in Damascus could mark an important symbolic turning point in the struggle to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The claim that a bomber was able to carry out such an attack against a high security target speaks volumes about the government's ability to protect its own members and raises questions about the broader capacities of Syria's "security state".

Caution, though, is still needed.

Details of the event are sketchy, contested, and rely upon elements all with their own axes to grind.

Why, according to reliable witnesses, does the building where the bomb apparently went off appear to be undamaged? Why has Syrian government TV refrained from showing its usual lurid images of the casualties?

Conspiracy theorists may have a field-day, but there is one inescapable fact.

The news put out by the Syrian government of a rebel attack against the very heart of the regime cannot be interpreted as anything other than a disaster for President Assad and his supporters.

It sends out a message that if these men cannot be protected by the state security apparatus, then who can? It is in this sense that the attack marks a new phase in the struggle for Syria's future.

What the BBC should really be asking is, if the Damascus bombing did not really occur, why would the Assad regime "put out" such self-defeating news?

What's more, will ABC, CBS and other major news sources adjust their reporting according to historical reality rather than continue embellishing this fictitious event? Will the U.S. government adjust its thinking for the truth rather than the latest lies from Damascus?

What is odd about this latest lie, however, is that it was delivered so sloppily, as if there was an intent to be caught. Why would that be? I honestly do not know. Maybe Syria and like authoritarian powers are just that arrogant in telling their bald-faced lies since they know how easily the uncritical media and mindless masses fall for such falsehoods.

Along the Syria-Turkey border, the bomb maker was displaying his homemade mortar launcher, crafted from a tube and bits of metal. "Whatever we need to produce, we Google it," said the factory worker turned rebel commander and arms procurer in a border village where goats and insurgents walk along steep mountain paths.

If this all weren't so tragic, preposterous news reports like this would be LMAO material. But, alas, since Western intelligence (an oxymoron if there ever was one) consistently falls for this nonsense, it's more like CMAO ("C" for cry).
So there you have it folks, the media have gotten to the bottom of the mystery of how the Syrian opposition has emerged and become magically so well-armed as to take on the historically brutal 300,000-man Syrian Armed Forces. Per the Global Post reports noted in yesterday's blog, around 40 percent of the Free Syrian Army's military equipment is purchased directly from the Syrian Army, about half their arms are looted from Syrian forces in combat and the remaining ten percent is brought in across the border from Islamic militants that use Google from their mud huts in border villages to search out designs for weapons manufacturing.
Now there's this bridge in Brooklyn I've been meaning to sell...

While most people have been carefully conditioned to blindly accept the upcoming chain of events as a consequence of randomness and historical misfortune, I maintain as always that what the world is witnessing is the product of the historical machinations of what former President Ronald Reagan dubbed the "Evil Empire":

The strategic objective of Moscow has never changed, i.e., the vilification and destruction of America and the Western powers for the sake of global military, geopolitical domination. It's simply that the tactics in recent decades have been necessarily deceptive.

This, of course, calls into question the whole 'spontaneous' character of the Egyptian Revolution and other associated Arab Spring uprisings and indicates that what the world is witnessing may have a hidden hand, I believe principally from the Kremlin, guiding the historical way.

With regard to Syria's role in Moscow's plan, I'm uncertain what is going on with the 'uprising' there, but some things seriously don't add up.

Consider for instance the arming of the "Free Syrian Army". Did you know that the vast majority of their arms have been supplied by the Syrian Armed Forces (SAF) to-date?

For the release of this prisoner, Ahmed Haseeba, the group received $500. With this money, Fatahallah said they were able to buy ammunition from their main supplier: Syria’s national army, also known as the enemy.

This strange cycle of exchanging prisoners for weapons has been playing out between rebel forces and President Bashar al-Assad’s army since the beginning of the revolution.

Fatahallah estimated that his village purchased 40 percent of their weapons from the regime. Prisoner exchanges have so far contributed almost $80,000 toward weapons purchases, he said. And they obtain an additional 50 percent of their weapons during battle. The remaining 10 percent are donated and smuggled from outside the country, or are purchased from private merchants, mostly from Iraq.

So the Syrian Army is arming the opposition, and somehow the West is being blamed for the insurgency?

Something is just not kosher here.

Now watch the following news report from the same source, Global Post, that was aired on the PBS Newshour on June 22nd, the day Syria shot down a Turkish jet:

From both the Global Post article and the video we find the following curious tidbit of information:

Back at the base, the men were relaxing after lunch when a loud explosion shocked everyone to their feet. As they feared, the previous night’s purchase of Kalashnikov bullets had been booby-trapped. This time their colleagues were lucky enough to survive the discovery.

The men had learned from prior experience — bullets acquired from the regime are sometimes emptied of their gunpowder and filled with TNT designed to destroy the Kalashnikov and its owner, rather than the enemy.

After several injuries and the loss of two rifles, the men had learned to spot the fakes. To everyone’s relief this had been a controlled explosion, by someone suspicious of the new batch. The damage inflicted was only a blackened hand, some singed hair and a hole in the table.

“These ones here are good bullets,” said battalion leader Asad Ibrahim, showing the red marking on the base of one of the bullets. Holding up another with a slightly darker red off-center mark he said, “These are Bashar’s bullets to explode our guns.”

Here's my read of this.

What your viewing is MISinformation.

If Bashar al-Assad's regime is intent on scuttling the 'Free Syrian Army' and opposition forces once and for all, and the Syrian Armed Forces (SAF) are the principal source of military equipment for their opponents, then wouldn't it make sense to crack down internally? What's more, any internal crackdown in the SAF would hopefully opt to eliminate the transfer of arms to the enemy rather than sabotaging a token few bullets. Can you imagine the American military combating the Taliban in Afghanistan by selling them armaments with a few booby-trapped bullets as some sort of ill-fated attempt at stopping opposition? This is obvious BS of the extraordinarily smelly sort intended for gullible Western audiences IMHO.

The dominant narrative of modern Middle East history emphasizes the depredations visited upon the region by European colonization and accepts as a truism that the former colonial powers prioritized the protection of their material interests—in oil, above all—above the dignity and self-determination of the region’s inhabitants. Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability. The most intractable of the regional conflicts to which this gave rise, that between the Arabs and Israelis, is attributed in this narrative to Israel’s unwillingness to accede to Palestinian national aspirations. Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region’s meddling overlords. Then came Mikhail Gorbachev—a Westernizing reformer. At last, the Cold War was over. A new world order was at hand.

What if this conventional wisdom is nonsense? Russian exile Pavel Stroilov argues just this in his forthcoming book, Behind the Desert Storm. “Not a word of it is true,” he writes. “It was the Soviet Empire—not the British Empire—that was responsible for the instability in the Middle East.”

Stroilov, a historian now living in London, fled Russia in 2003 after stealing 50,000 top-secret Kremlin documents from the Gorbachev Foundation archives, where he was working as a researcher. He was given access to the archive in 1999, but Gorbachev refused him permission to copy its most significant documents. Having observed the network administrator entering the password into the system, Stroilov reproduced the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.

....

Stroilov’s book about these documents, many only now translated into English, challenges the conventional wisdom that Western colonialists are to blame for the chaos in the region. All of its major conflicts, he argues, were caused by Soviet expansionism. Terrorism and the rabid anti-Israeli animus of the Arab world were Soviet inspirations....The documents clearly suggest that many contemporary conflicts in the Middle East were fomented by the Soviet empire, particularly in the final years before its break-up. And the events he describes have had a significant impact upon the current state of the region—from the conflict in Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, to the development of a de facto alliance between the European Union and the Arab states.

....

In a National Review article, (Ion) Pacepa (the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc) recalls a conversation he had with KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who envisioned fomenting “a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world. … We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.”

In the mid-1970s, Pacepa recalls, the KGB ordered its Eastern European sister agencies to scour the Middle East for trusted agents, train them in disinformation and terrorism, and export a “rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism.” They showered the region with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and KGB-fabricated documents alleging that Israel and the United States were dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.

Following the defeat of the Egyptians in the Six Day War, the Soviets came to a second realization: A conventional military confrontation with Israel, and by extension the West, carried too great a risk of escalating into nuclear war. A change of tactics was required.

I believe that change in tactics included the determination that a global nuclear war need be fought to achieve final victory, something spelled out in Joseph Douglass' classic 1979 text, Soviet Strategy For Nuclear War (Hoover international studies). Douglass noted how classified Soviet military literature emphasized the importance of "surprise" over and over again as the key to victory over the West in a conflict that involves the rapid delivery of weapons of mass destruction by missiles.

In thinking 'The Unthinkable', Moscow strategists would have considered the seeming inevitability of a full-scale East-West conflict and determined it would likely emanate from the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particularly. Hence, an optimal strategy was devised to wage an era of 'false peace' to delude the West into an effectively suicidal false sense of security such that our nuclear guard be minimized as much as possible before full-scale conflict. Meanwhile, the Mideast cauldron has been manipulated in such a way that when war comes, Israeli aggressiveness ("Zionism") and Western "Imperialism" in the region will be blamed for causing the global holocaust of mass destruction in the form of a nuclear third world war that just happens to catch the West totally by surprise.

What's incredibly sad and tragic, IMHO, is that in 20+ years seemingly no one (save maybe Jeff Nyquist) has been willing to see history the way I have and do something to contravene the catastrophic fate everyone is wittingly and/or unwittingly making. Indeed, I think it's as I've long-since assessed: ours is a very, very sick species that prefers comforting lies to the hard truth at almost every turn even though this is collectively suicidal in the long-run.

WASHINGTON — Syria has started moving some parts of its huge stockpile of chemical weapons out of storage, US officials said Friday, but it was uncertain whether the transfer was a precaution as security conditions across the country rapidly deteriorated or something more sinister.

Some analysts and lawmakers said Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, might use chemical weapons in a last-ditch attack against an increasingly potent rebel force, possibly as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Other officials said Syrian security forces might be moving parts of the arsenal to prevent it from falling into rebel hands.

“The truth is, we just don’t know,’’ said one US official who has been monitoring intelligence reports since the Syrians began moving the chemical weapons in recent days. ‘‘There’s a big gaping hole in what we know.’’

Western military sources warned Saturday, July 14, that not only Israel, but Turkey and Jordan, too, should prepare for chemical missile strikes by a beleaguered Bashar Assad after missiles were test-fired this week in the Syrian war game against all three. There is disagreement in the West on Assad’s motives for moving his WMD out of storage. Some US officials say he is safeguarding them against falling into rebel hands; British officials report chemical weapons at Homs, Latakia and Aleppo deployed for ethnical cleansing.

In association with this comment one should consider these other quotes from famous scientists:

"It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us." - Stephen Hawking, 'A Brief History of Time', p.127

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".

To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.

Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.” ― Paul Davies

In debating with athiests, typically their initial dispute with belief in God is that there 'is no evidence'. While there's incompetent theists out there, particularly among Christian "fundamentalists" who will often seek to retort by making seemingly illiterate references to 'young earth' postulations (which serve to encourage rather than upset non-believers), the obvious counterpoint is that EVERYTHING WE OBSERVE IN THE UNIVERSE is evidence of a divine Creator:

In this sense Einstein is wrong. The "coincidences" we observe in our universe that allow life in the first place are not a way for God to remain anonymous but rather are the calling card that God exists.

While in science there will still be irrationalizations to try and escape the reality of God for the sake of personal reputations and academic tenure (see Ben Stein's Expelled), the truth is that the fundamental premise of religion has always been sound:

There is a God who created the universe that intended intelligent creatures like us to experience and comprehend His creation. Why? It's actually quite simple.

If God is love, then His only being is through sharing with others since love is relational. Thus, God had to create comprehending others to be God.

As for those who continue to refuse to "believe" in God in light of the literally infinite historical evidence, that's their prerogative. However, they have no right to claim that "reason" is on their side....au contraire.

Backup This Blog

Please DOWNLOAD A BACKUP COPY of this blog (right click and save) from time to time for safe-keeping. The information revealed through here is so sensitive for those now in authority that I expect eventual state censorship.

Global TV Streams

Profound Quotations

"The plans for the resurrection of the USSR are well known to Putin and the present regime and are outlined in the documents of the UCP-CPSU and Communist Party of the Union [of Russia and Belarus]." - Oleg Shenin, Chair, (Restored) Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2003

"Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep." - Mikhail Gorbachev, November 1987

"Communist ideology in its pure form is akin to Christianity. Its main ideas are the brotherhood of all peoples irrespective of their nationality, justice and equality, peace, and an end to all hostility between peoples." - Mikhail Gorbachev's 'Memoirs', 1996

"Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind." - Mikhail Gorbachev

"If we presume the coming transformation of the Communist Party into the Russian Orthodox Party of the Soviet Union, we would obtain truly the ideal state, one which would fulfill the historical destiny of the Russian people. It is a question of the Orthodoxization of the entire world." - Gennadii Shimanov (quoted in Alexander Yanov's The Russian Challenge)

"My feelings tell me that someday a Slavic Orthodox tsar shall take the socialist movement in hand and, with the blessing of the Church, set up a socialist form of life in place of the bourgeois one. And this Socialism will be a new and severe....form of slavery..." - Konstantin Leont'ev

"An empire of the Orthodox Balkan peoples together with the empire of Holy Russia - not the present marxist, un-Russian Russia, but Holy Orthodox Russia - can bring happiness to all mankind and realize that mystical millennial kingdom of peace on earth, which appeared in a vision on the island of Patmos to that glorious apostle and visionary, St. John the Evangelist. For that Millennium has never yet been made a reality in the history of the world, and what has been destined by God, must become a reality. Who will make it a reality if not those who up to the present day have been the most martyred and reviled, carved up and downtrodden, i.e., the Slavs and the other Orthodox Peoples?" - quote taken from "A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality" written by Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich (1880-1956)

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." - Josef Stalin

"It would not matter if 3/4ths of the human race perished; the important thing is that the remaining 1/4th be communist." - Vladimir Lenin

"Today's weapons make it possible to achieve strategic objectives very quickly. The very first nuclear attack on the enemy may inflict such immense casualties and produce such vast destruction that his economic, moral-political and military caabilities will collapse, making it impossible for him to continue to struggle, and presenting him with the fact of defeat." - Colonel M.P. Skirdo, quoted in Soviet Strategy For Nuclear War

Key Related Articles

"Behind the mask of diplomatic and political cooperation and partnership with the United States and Europe, the current Russian leaders are following the strategy of their predecessors and working towards a 'New World Order'.
When the right moment comes the mask will be dropped and the Russians with Chinese help will seek to impose their system on the West on their own terms..."

"War to the hilt between Communism and Capitalism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in 20 or 30 years. To win, we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions.The capitalistic countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we will smash them with our clenched fist."

"The failure of U.S. policymakers to comprehend the veiled aggressiveness and hostility towards the United States inherent in Sino-Soviet strategy and the belief that the political and economic reforms in Russia and the partial introduction of capitalism in China have foreshadowed these countries' development into real democracies, have eroded the effectiveness of U.S. policies in the foreign affairs, defense, intelligence and counter-intelligence fields. U.S. policymakers have recklessly accepted the premise that Russia and China are no longer enemies, but are rather potential allies and partners fully deserving of U.S. support. Only countries like Iran, (pre-2003) Iraq and North Korea - which (ironically, in this context) work secretly with Russia and China - are still considered potential adversaries."

"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come." [Matthew 12:30-32]

"For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and he who humbles himself will be exalted." [Luke 14:11]

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Winston Churchill"I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house. So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice..." - Martin Luther King, 1967

"Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants." - William Penn